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On Principles

Course video 44 of 51

In this module, you’ll examine the ethical implications of persuasion and the responsibilities that come with having a powerful leveraging toolkit. By looking at examples of our own unconscious biases, you’ll gain a better understanding of where your perspective and values stand. You’ll learn how to find the right balance in making the necessary tradeoffs while exerting sustainable influence. Through exploring different hypothetical scenarios in the Hard Questions Survey, you’ll form strategies to avoid common pitfalls while leveraging influence. By the end of this module, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the ethics of persuasion and influence, and be able to make difficult decisions that are more aligned with you and your organization’s values.

Influence

Universidad de Pensilvania

Curso 4 de 4 en Achieving Personal and Professional Success Programa Especializado

What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.

Impartido por:

Cade Massey
Practice Professor

Transcripción

In the last lecture, we pushed you to think about the principles that were

guiding your decisions, as we went through the hard question survey.

Let's take a moment, and talk a little bit more about principles, before we push into

the final section on some frameworks and some prescriptions for ethics.

So principles are abstract ideas that govern behavior across situations.

They are useful in providing direction and guidance in your decision making.

They can be a source of utility in and of themselves.

They can be a source of respect from others.

But they also can strain your choices.

And this is the trade-off that we really want to push on here for a little bit.

And again, this is something that we've been talking about off and on,

directly and indirectly, since the beginning of the course.

So we're just kind of laying things out a little more explicitly, this time around.

I want to begin with a quote from Otto von Bismarck

from Chris Clark's book on the Iron Kingdom, the history of Germany.

Bismarck gets credit for unifying Germany.

This is a little bit of an exaggeration but

he was the most important politician there in the late 19th century and

was hugely influential in bringing together as a country

Bismarck disparaged theory and principle as yardsticks for political life.

The result was a freedom from ideological constraints that made his behaviour

unpredictable, one could call it realism, pragmatism or opportunism,

an ability to spring from one camp to another, wrong-footing his opponents.

He said, if I am to proceed through life on the basis of principles, it is

as if I were to talk down a narrow path in the woods with a long pole in my mouth.

This is how Bismarck felt about principles.

He clearly didn't have much room for them and he believed he gained some political

advantage by kind of putting it all on the back burner.

So we're asking you to think a little bit about what role principles

play in your life.

And what principles are guiding your behavior.

We've had this discussion with classrooms over the last couple years.

And we end up with interesting collections.

So consider the question.

What principles would you like to live by?

What principles do you want to guide your behavior?

This is what one board looked like after one discussion.

These are Full time MBA's and if you can work through my chicken scratches,

you see they came up with things like honesty, integrity, reliability, equality,

loyalty, respect, optimism, development,

modesty, kindness, balance, fun, authenticity.

This is a big list, this is something like 20, 25 principles.

Any one of which would be hard to argue with and you might be

reaffirmed in your faith in MBA as to see such a list.

But I ask you, what would happen if you tried to live by all those principles?

All these, any one of them would be defendable.

But if you tried to live by all of them at the same time, could you act at all?

Could you make any decision?

This is the constraining aspect of principles, as well.

If you really want to honor a principle, it constrains you in some way.

In fact, it's just cheap talk until it constrains you.

So let's acknowledge that you're not going to be able to live by all your

principles all the time.

And I think, by this point in the course, you've seen that, to exercise influence in

big challenging situations, you probably will have to compromise some principles.

And precisely because you have to compromise some principles,

we want you to be thoughtful about those principles you don't want to compromise.

To know what your fundamental principles are that you want to

prioritize above all else.

So that when the pressure comes, you don't compromise those.

That's what we're pushing you to think about right now.

So what is worth fighting for?

What is not worth fighting for?

Let's just be a little bit more explicit about it than we usually are.

Let's acknowledge the tradeoff and be a little bit more explicit about it.

Effectiveness.

Political effectiveness, influence, often requires flexibility, and compromise.

Idealism is costly.

So de Mello, for example, would never had repatriated 400,000

Cambodian refugees if he hadn't been willing to sit down with the Khmer Rouge,

some of the worst people in the history of the world.

But he was able to sit down with them,

was willing to sit down with them, was not to idealistic to sit down with them and

as a result was able to bring hundreds of thousands of Cambodians back home.

On the other hand, to be without principles or

to have them moved around by external forces too easily, invites trouble.

This suggest you need to know which lines you will not cross,

what principles you will not sacrifice, what your principle hierarchy actually is.

So we're pushing you right now to think something about that, to articulate it.

And in the next lecture, we'll move toward a framework for

ethical use of these influence tactics.

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